Eight Must-Haves for Your Hourly Hiring Solution

Not all recruiting is alike. Most providers of hiring solutions focus on the needs of full-time recruiters who assist and oversee the hiring process for salaried positions.

Hiring for hourly employees is markedly different, especially in an environment where local managers do the hiring. Hourly hiring is hard and has potentially profound consequences for your business – both good and bad.

According to the United States Labor Department data, nearly 56 percent of the U.S. workforce is paid on an hourly basis.

Given that the majority of the U.S. workforce is hourly, coupled with the fact that the hourly workforce experiences a significantly higher employee turnover rate, it is imperative to have an hourly hiring solution designed explicitly for that need.

Here are the eight must-haves for your Hourly Hiring Solution

1. Evergreen Job Postings

Some companies with a high concentration of hourly employees experience annual turnover percentages in the high double digits, some even triple digits. An employee termination may come with very little or no notice.

Evergreen job postings, which never close, were specifically designed for high volume hiring, where there is a consistent demand for employees. By providing a constant flow of candidates, positions are filled faster and with less effort.

Ending the need to open and close requisitions saves time and money.

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2. Applicant Pooling

Let’s say someone applies for a job at one of your locations near where they live. They’re a great candidate, but the location manager doesn’t have any open positions.

Applicant pooling is a feature that, after a designated period, automatically allows other nearby location managers to consider that candidate for their open position. Maximize the available applicants across multiple locations and reduce candidate rejections with applicant pooling.

3. Ease of Use

The store manager is not a recruiter per se but does have recruiting responsibilities, as well as many other job duties. For them, recruiting may be secondary to serving customers and running operations. Your store managers don’t use a hiring solution daily, so when they do, it must be simple to learn and use.

A word here about talent management suite solutions: finding the right employee is arguably the best investment in human capital management that an enterprise can make. Performance management modules and learning systems can be complicated and time-consuming. They are not meaningful if employees only stay on the job for a few weeks or months.

You’ll get a better return on investment through reduced turnover and increased productivity by putting more emphasis on hiring the right person. Once you have long-term employees, your manager will have more time to invest in employee development.

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4. Texting Solutions - Candidate Communications

It’s important in today’s competitive labor market to communicate with candidates as quickly as possible. Once initial interest has been established, it’s okay to drop the formality. Using a texting platform is the perfect way to reach candidates where they are the most – on their phones.

Texting allows recruiters and hiring managers to communicate quickly and directly with candidates at any time. Text messages are opened and read 98% of the time versus a 20% read rate for emails. Most texts are read within 5 seconds of receipt. Staying engaged with candidates ensures that your company and position are top of mind.

Your texting platform should allow your hiring team to text from their mobile phones or applicant tracking system.

Today’s texting solutions allow for two-way texting and mass texting and can be automated. Mass texting is an effortless way to let your applicant pool know about upcoming job fairs, seasonal openings, or vacant positions. Automated texting helps save your team time and ensures candidates continue being engaged.

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5. Employee Referral Program

One of the quickest ways to find quality employees is to ask your best employees for referrals. 88% of employers say referrals are their number one best source for above-average applicants.

Implementing an employee referral program should not increase the workload on your HR staff or hiring managers. Gone are the days when programs were tracked on spreadsheets.

Today’s referral programs use intuitive platforms and automation to register employees for your program, source and contact their referrals, track and payout referral bonuses, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. If you don’t have an in-house program, they are plenty of third-party referral programs from which to choose.

Optimizing or integrating an employee referral program does not need to be a daunting task. And it’s well worth the effort. An effective employee referral program can quickly drive quality candidates to your application process, speed time-to-hire, increase productivity, and minimize costly turnover.

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6. Analytics

There is a general perception that more candidates will solve most of the hiring problems.

What do store managers complain about? They don’t have enough candidates. Internet job boards can provide a ton of candidates if you pay enough money.

Problem solved? Not really.

The applicant to hire ratio, turnover rates and performance metrics for employees sourced through internet job boards are consistently worse than other candidate sources. If you use hiring and reporting analytics, you will see this in your data.

Your hiring solution must provide sourcing and other analytics so that you have a complete picture of your hiring process. Otherwise, you’ll never know from where your best hires come, and you’ll continue to throw money at unproductive sourcing channels.

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7. Decision Support

Congratulations! – You have created a great brand and are receiving more applications than your hiring teams can process.

What happens when you have five positions to fill, and you receive 1,000 applications? Will your store manager review all 1,000 applications to find the best candidates? Not likely. They will look at a dozen, maybe 20, and make the hires based on those applications.

But what about the other 980? Buried in the stack may be the best candidate you’ve ever seen. How do you find that candidate?

Today’s high-volume hiring solutions must have a decision support system powered by machine learning. Without it, you will never optimize your talent acquisition system to find the best applicants. A machine learning algorithm can analyze those 1,000 applications in seconds and make recommendations as to which applicants will make the best employees.

However, don’t be fooled by machine learning systems that simply try to automate the recruiting decisions your hiring managers currently make. Such systems are trained to hire the way your managers previously hired. What good is it to continue to make bad hires, but do it more quickly?

You need machine learning algorithms that will evaluate candidates against the characteristics and traits that your best-performing employees possess. Both pre-hire candidate data and post-hire employee data is required to make the best decision.

With this type of system, your hiring manager can find the best applications for your particular business model. Out of those recommended candidates, the people you hire will not only be great employees, but they will also feel a sense of satisfaction, engagement, and fulfillment in their jobs.

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8. Diversity and Inclusion

An effective decision support system is also critical to achieving your business’ diversity and inclusion goals. Machine learning algorithms are designed to review candidates in a consistent manner, free from bias, to recommend candidates based on non-discriminatory factors.

Companies with a mission and strategy to support a diverse workplace can leverage the decision support system to achieve a competitive business advantage. Numerous studies have shown that companies that embrace diversity and inclusion in all aspects of their business attract top talent and statistically outperform their peers.

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Wrap Up

Hiring and managing an hourly workforce comes with a unique set of problems.

Just throwing a large number of candidate applications at your hiring managers is not going to solve bad hires or high turnover.

Fortunately, there are hiring solutions designed to meet the needs of companies with distributed hourly workforces and steps you can take to identify top candidates and reduce turnover.

Evergreen job postings and applicant pooling can supply a steady pipeline of candidates. Assessments, analytics, and the right machine learning can help you find the best employees within that stack of applications in a way that promotes diversity and inclusion.

Making successful talent acquisition easier for hiring managers will reduce employee turnover and free them to manage operations. This will positively impact your company’s bottom line.

Change your hiring processes now to accommodate these eight must-haves, and you’ll be on your way to better hiring, a better workforce, and better satisfaction in your talent acquisition role.

Are you looking for help with high-volume hourly hiring?

From an easy-to-use applicant tracking system to a decision support system, Cadient has the solutions to help simplify and optimize your talent acquisition process. We have worked with some of the largest retailers in the world and have processed millions of applications. 

Contact us today so our hiring experts can help you find the best recruiting solution for your company.